Tish Sommers, 71, Women`s Activist

``It`s not easy to let go,`` she said not long ago. ``Life is sweet, and I`ve been amazed to learn how much you can put up with and still savor life.`` A few months before she died Friday, at 71, she sponsored a national conference that drew hundreds of people to talk about how to die with dignity. She wanted people to have a ``living will`` to spell out how they wish to be treated if they become incapacitated.

When she was divorced, she focused national attention on the problems of newly divorced women with few skills, little money, no insurance, children and a lot of unmet needs.

When she grew older, she got the White House to hold a conference on problems of older women and in 1980 cofounded the Older Women`s League.

In her distinctively vibrant, gracious way, she lobbied Congress and President Reagan to change a society which, the league said, rewards men with retirement plans, medical benefits, profit sharing and gold watches while it gives women Mother`s Day.

In five years the league has grown to 90 chapters with 13,000 members.

Tish Sommers` rallying cry for all the momentous times of her life became famous. ``Organize--Don`t Agonize,`` she urged.

Her orange business card with a witch on it said she was a freelance agitator. ``Me retire?,`` it read, ``I`ve just begun to fly!``

Her passion was for dancing. Even at 70, she started every morning dancing to Helen Reddy`s ``I Am Woman.``

In 1933, at age 19, she went to Germany to study dance.

She was married briefly and divorced and then married again for 23 years, when she obtained a ``friendly`` divorce from Joseph Sommers, a college professor. He kept custody of their adopted son.

Her years of ``do-gooder activism`` became a career when she met Laurie Shields, who was trying to re-enter the advertising field at the age of 55 after her husband died. Together they began successfully lobbying 39 states and Congress to pass displaced-homemaker laws, which offered training for women seeking jobs.

But lack of funds and other forms of age and sex discrimination made such laws too weak to do much good, she said, and she and Shields founded the Older Women`s League in 1980.

``Women in my generation grew up to be dependent on men but we wanted to be independent of our children,`` Mrs. Sommers once said. ``What we didn`t anticipate was that we would outlive men. And the price of that independence